by James Hynes
“Relax,” Kevin says out loud, smiling insincerely at himself in the mirror. “I’m harmless.” He replaces his wallet and keys in the pockets of his new trousers, scoops the change off the damp counter into his palm. He steps to the urinal and empties his bladder of all the iced tea he’s been drinking, his stream spattering the little plastic filter that says JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS. Then he returns to the sinks and washes his hands, turning his newly scrubbed face this way and that in the mirror. He stands, squares his shoulders, plucks the tie out of his pocket, and ties it quickly in the mirror, cinching it until he’s happy, then loosening it a bit and undoing his top shirt button for the trip back downtown. He flips the changing table up against the wall—for the last time or the first?—and hits the door just as the singer gives a final, soulful grunt—Unhhh, tempted by the fruit of another, tempted but the truth is discovered…
… what’s been going on, thinks Kevin. At last there’s someone behind the Customer Service counter, a short, buxom, black-haired young woman in a fitted shirt, also flipping through a ring binder, and Kevin, cooled and cleaned and smelling of coconut and new clothes, steps up with a smile and puts both hands on the counter.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ve left my cell phone at home. Could you call me a cab?”
Feeling refreshed and dapper, Kevin waits in the vestibule between the two banks of doors at the front of store. Gazing out the tinted doors at a yellow minivan coasting toward him through the dusty glare of the nearly empty parking lot, he’s thinking he should just tell the cabbie to take him straight to the airport, adding like some wiseguy in a snap-brim fedora, “And make it snappy, chief.” Might as well just go home, he thinks. He still can’t make up his mind about Stella, but what he’ll probably do is let things drift until she presents him with a positive pregnancy test, and by then it’ll be too late to abandon her. He will back into fatherhood the way he’s backed into everything else in his life. He’s already certain that he’s not going to take the job here, whatever it is, even if they offer it to him. Move to Texas? What the hell was he thinking?
The cab stops at the curb, and the cabbie’s silhouette peers toward the store. Kevin puts on his sunglasses and pushes out the door into the midday sun. Through the viscous air he hears the grumble of the cab’s engine and the waterfall rush of the nearby freeway. Only mad dogs and Englishmen, thinks Kevin, gripping the hot door handle and sliding open the minivan’s rear door. He climbs up onto the stiff seat, then heaves the door shut with a satisfying chunk. Enfolded in the cab’s pine-scented AC, he hauls the seat belt across and clicks it. The cabbie, a skeletally lean young black man, tilts his close-cropped head slightly, so that Kevin can only see his sharp, ebony cheekbone.
“Downtown,” Kevin says, tugging his jacket straight, shooting his cuffs like some high roller. Without a word, the cabbie puts the minivan in gear. Wohl’s glides backwards in Kevin’s window.
Well, why not? He’s spent all this money to come all this way, he might as well go through with the interview, even if he doesn’t really want the job. Five hundred for the plane ticket—though they’re going to reimburse him—another forty bucks on two cab rides, wait, make that sixty for three cab rides, because it’ll cost him another twenty to get back to the airport from downtown. Not to mention seventy bucks on new clothes. Cruising down the parking lot, the cabbie taps on the brake for an attractive thirtysomething in khaki shorts and a tight sleeveless blouse who is carrying a bag from Neiman Marcus. The cab passes behind her as she approaches a parked SUV, and Kevin turns to watch her open the hatchback, her heels lifted from her flip-flops, her calves taut, her firm arm extended, her blouse lifting to bare the small of her back. No tattoo like Kelly had, alas, but an admirably round ass, and dirty blond hair brushing her freckled shoulders. Kevin faces front again, simultaneously reminded of Stella’s toned upper arms and of the freckled shoulders of long-lost Lynda, and he smiles to realize that that’s why he just dropped seventy dollars on new clothes—the money isn’t an index of his professional ambition, it’s the price of his foolish middle-aged longing, his geriatric priapism. If he’d kept his mind on the interview to begin with, he’d still be downtown in Starbucks. It wasn’t ambition, but lust and nostalgia that wilted his shirt and tore his trousers and bloodied his socks, and it wasn’t even really lust for Kelly, fine as she was, it was lust for a woman he hasn’t even seen in twenty-five years. Lynda would be forty-five now, at least. Probably thicker around the middle, broader in the hips, her slinky walk buried under the sediment of middle age, her sleekness blunted, her pale skin a little less springy than it was. And what happens to freckled girls as they age? What do freckles look like on a forty-five-year-old? Do they fade away or do they become age spots? Do women at midlife pay cosmetic surgeons to save their freckles or erase them? Is it cruel to think this way? Having lived in Ann Arbor for thirty years, he regularly runs into old lovers or college classmates—the way he ran into Beth at Gaia Market—but he’s watched them age in small increments. What takes him by surprise is running into some old high school crush when he’s visiting his mom in Royal Oak, someone he hasn’t seen since the seventies. Usually she recognizes him before he recognizes her, and he has to fake it for a moment, pretending at first that he knows who she is, and then pretending he isn’t taken aback at how she’s changed since her days of hip-hugging bell bottoms and halter tops and ironed hair. He doesn’t always succeed, and no matter how enthusiastically he says, “You look great!” or “Of course I knew it was you!” he can see her gauge his response. It’s the same when he’s channel-surfing and he comes across some formerly dewy sitcom actress he fantasized about in his teens and twenties, and the sight of her playing a gruff lesbian mom on Lifetime or a gorgon of a defense attorney on Law and Order depresses him like nothing else. But Lynda, Lynda, whatever happened to Lynda? From that steamy summer until now, as often as he’s retrospectively fantasized about that one night on the porch, it has rarely occurred to him to wonder where she is now. Would he even recognize her if he passed her on the street?
The cab negotiates the maze of hedges, and the little bushes with purple flowers bristle at Kevin from beyond his window. Without his intending it to happen, the faces of the women he’s known are stuttering now before him like a mis-sprocketed film. Beth, Stella, the Philosopher’s Daughter, Lynda—there are others, but those are the four who are popping up most often in his sexual highlight reel. The minivan rocks over a speed bump, and Kevin feels a tingling in his balls. He and Beth sometimes made love as if they were struggling for mastery, grappling like a pair of sweaty high school wrestlers, each trying for a more lethal grip, muscles taut as guy lines as they grunted and strained against each other, racing to see who could make the other finish first. In this battle of wills, making the other climax wasn’t tenderness but one-upmanship: it was getting the other to cry uncle, it was earning a victory by which the other was stripped bare. He grinned fiercely in her face as he pinned her by the wrists and pounded her, grunting, “Give it up, give it up.” And sometimes she’d pinned him, straddling him like a playground bully and grinding against him, pressing him down by the wrists and baring her teeth and laughing like a frat-boy date rapist: “You know you want it.” In these ruthless contests, if he came first he sobbed aloud as if he were ashamed and turned his face away. And if she came first, she groaned as if in pain and then fended him off with a forearm and rolled out from under him, curled on the edge of the bed with her chest heaving as if she’d just pulled herself out of dark, cold water. It wasn’t like this all the time or even most of the time—they had sentimental sex and sleepy sex and conversational sex and make-up sex like any other long-term couple—but what he remembers now are those desperate grapplings.
There’s passion for you, Kevin thinks, his cock semihard in his boxer briefs. He wonders if he could adjust himself without the cabbie noticing, but just as he glances at the glossy back of the cabbie’s head—trapezius muscles like a weightlifter�
�s, a shiny scalp under stubbled hair—the driver looks right as he changes lanes. The radio is muttering now, the cabbie’s turned it up. More talk radio; Kevin can hear the shrillness of the announcer, though he can’t make out what he’s saying. Don’t the cabbies here ever listen to music? Isn’t Austin supposed to be the live music capital of the world? Kevin grips his knees and shifts his legs, which relieves the pressure on his hard-on. He’s surprised to see that they’ve left the shopping center and are already cruising north up Lamar, back the way he came with Claudia Barrientos, the street wide and flat and laced over with wires, under a whitish sky. Kevin sees things he hadn’t noticed coming the other way: a Wendy’s in a grove of gnarled trees; a scruffy used-car lot flying both American and Mexican flags; a low, ancient, ramshackle wooden dance hall with an unlit neon sign reading THE BROKEN SPOKE. Another place I’ll never go, thinks Kevin, coasting downhill back toward downtown, then back to the airport, back to Ann Arbor, back to Stella.
Whom he doesn’t love, or so he keeps telling himself. Yet their lovemaking can be surprisingly tender. Part of that’s the difference in their ages: no matter how many bench presses he does or how far he runs, he’s still fifty, so no more three vigorous copulations a night—it’s two if he’s lucky, once or twice a week, and the second time is an uphill climb. Like a general fighting the previous war, a couple of times early on he tried to grapple with Stella the way he’d grappled with Beth, pinning her wrists to the sheets, but she stiffened as if in pain and gasped, “Please don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, instantly releasing her. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Stella may like her faux-leather handcuffs from time to time, but that’s about performance and make-believe and a kind of adolescent role-playing that Kevin has learned to go along with and even enjoy. Instead, what he can offer Stella in bed is midlife courtliness. What he feels toward her, in fact, is a kind of protectiveness, and on those rare occasions when he tries to plumb the mystery of Stella—who made the scars on her inner thighs and why, who she’s talking to in the Stella Continuum and what they’re talking about, why she wakes up sweating and shuddering in the middle of the night, what she’s looking at when she doesn’t seem to be looking at anything—he wonders what could have happened to her before he met her that makes her respond so gratefully to simple kindness. Mutual gratitude may even be the foundation of their relationship, because he knows that at his age he’s lucky to be having any sex at all with a fit and energetic younger woman.
“… in St. Paul, Minnesota,” says the minivan’s radio, suddenly even louder. “Reports are still sketchy at this time…”
Kevin watches the cabbie’s long arm, all muscle and bone, withdrawing from the radio dial. Their gazes meet in the rearview. The cabbie has wide, deep-set, mournful eyes, and the instant he sees Kevin looking back, he reaches for the radio again and turns down the volume.
“We goin’ where downtown, exactly?” the cabbie says to Kevin in the mirror. He has a musical accent, which Kevin guesses is African.
Up ahead, framed by telephone poles and power lines, broad Lamar descends into a gentle curve lined with trees and billboards and low buildings. Against the bleached sky rises a new condo tower like something made of Legos, and the narrow dome of the Texas capitol. Kevin can’t see the pronged tower, and he still can’t remember its name, nearly calling it Barad-dûr out loud.
“Sixth and Congress,” he says, shifting in his seat, picturing the view from Starbucks: the homeless guy in the lamé dress and Laura Petrie wig; the flat-bellied, sweat-free guys in khakis; the swaying, bare-midriffed nymphets; Kelly, with her duffel over her shoulder, swinging her hips like a sailor on shore leave. Kelly, who led him astray and wilted his suit and tore his trousers and lacerated his knee, who lured him off the map to his fall. Only it wasn’t really Kelly who’s to blame, it was Lynda, and it wasn’t even really Lynda, but his nostalgia for the only truly uncomplicated and regret-free fucking he’s ever done in his life. Not even in retrospect does he feel any tenderness for Lynda, which is probably why he hardly ever wonders what happened to her. Even when they were lovers, she provoked no other emotion in him but desire, and for that reason, probably, twenty-five years later she looms larger in his fantasy life than all the other women he’s known put together. Even more than the Philosopher’s Daughter—about whom, it sometimes amazes him to realize, he has never fantasized sexually.
Whoa, thinks Kevin, nearly saying it out loud. Riding semi-aroused in an air-conditioned minivan in sweltering Austin, the glare outside cut by the window tint and his own amber sunglasses, Kevin is breathless suddenly, his heart racing. The tapestry of trees and bungalows on either side scrolls past the windows, while up ahead the sun-hazed backdrop of the capitol dome and condo towers and skeletal construction cranes slides from side to side with each curve of Lamar. At last Barad-dûr is visible, and it seems to glide back and forth like it’s being trundled about by unseen stagehands. Not once over the years has he ever daydreamed about the Philosopher’s Daughter, who at the time he thought he would love until he died, and yet his three month’s worth of couplings with Lynda, whose last name he doesn’t even remember, are his go-to memories—à la plage, on the dance floor, on the railing—whenever he needs to arouse himself. She is his default fantasy, his shortcut to a quick ecstasy.
And now, in a little bubble of freezing air drifting down a wide commercial street in Austin, Texas, he realizes once again that the primacy of Lynda in his imagination is because of the Philosopher’s Daughter. He’s not proud of it, and it’s not something that he likes to contemplate, but it’s true. The reason he has never sullied his memory of the Philosopher’s Daughter with self-abuse is because of that night at her parent’s house, the night of one of her impromptu parties, when their mutual friend Wayne carted his whole stereo out to the house because her parents’ ancient hi-fi wasn’t up to the job. Wayne set up the system in her parents’ living room and blasted his painstakingly composed party tapes into the warm summer night while everyone danced on the creaking floorboards of the Philosopher’s farmhouse. Kevin had been out dancing with Lynda already on a number of occasions—he loved to watch her wave her arms in the air, like Anna’s arms on the roof of Taco Rapido, raised to the sky (as Kevin now passes) in invocation of… what? Perhaps she overheard Kevin’s story on the packed dirt patio below and like some local, tutelary deity, the Tex-Mex goddess of desire, she has lifted her hands to bless his nostalgic erection, or at least to bless his memory of that one particular night, because that’s the night he best remembers Lynda on the dance floor, with the Philosopher’s surprisingly shabby Persian rug rolled up and the sofa pushed back, the coffee table jammed against the wall and littered with flakes of weed and grains of cocaine. On the sofa sprawled Wayne, a plump Asian guy, smoking cigarette after cigarette and nodding behind the screen of his long black hair to the music, watching the dancers and only occasionally dancing himself. The Philosopher’s Daughter herself danced to every song, often bolting from the dance floor midsong, laughing, to abandon one partner and pull another onto the floor, working her way with a teasing evenhandedness through her entire roster of suitors. But this wasn’t like the TV party, when she had been a queen bee surrounded only by wistful wannabees—no, tonight there were actually other girls at this party, lots of them. This was only a month or two after the Philosopher’s Daughter had rejected him, and Kevin made a point of introducing Lynda to the Daughter during the ringing silence between dance tapes, while Wayne squatted at the tape deck picking the next one with exquisite judgment and the sweaty dancers wandered out to the back porch for beer and a breeze.
“This is Lynda,” Kevin had said, his arm curled around her narrow waist, his hand cupped over her hip. The room was lit only by a couple of red bulbs plugged into a floor lamp in the corner. The sash windows were open to the whirring crickets outside, but even so the room was fifteen degrees hotter than the summer night, humid with sweat and spilled beer and the sweet reek of reefer. Even i
n the resinous gloom, Kevin could see that the Philosopher’s Daughter was flushed and excited, her hair pasted with sweat to her forehead.
“Oh, hi!” she shouted, rocking back on her heels and laughing, piercing Kevin’s heart even as he stood with his arm around another warm girl. “Hi!” she chirped again, as high-pitched as a chipmunk, but Lynda gave her just a slow, sleepy smile, stroking Kevin’s back as she let her heavy-lidded gaze stray around the room. The Daughter, her pupils dilated, just blinked at Kevin and laughed again, and Kevin, to fill the silence, was about to say “Great party” when the music erupted once more and Wayne jumped up and started one of his infrequent boogies, throwing his bulk around and flinging his black hair about like a go-go dancer’s. Without a word Lynda tugged Kevin away by the hand as the Philosopher’s Daughter blinked dopily after them in the dim cathouse light. He turned away from her and instead watched Lynda kick her flip-flops to the wall, then start snapping her fingers over her head, slouching and swaying and closing her eyes behind the screen of her disheveled hair.
Kevin’s dimly aware of the metallic insinuation of the radio—“Early indications,” in the measured tones of an NPR announcer, “significant casualties”—and above the trees along a stretch of Lamar Kevin doesn’t remember, all he sees is the faded bedsheet of Texas sky. His hand on the radio, the cabbie is watching Kevin in the rearview, but Kevin’s trying to remember that first song he danced to at the party with Lynda, and he can’t. Despite his record store job, he was just enough older than the other dancers that the music wasn’t instantly familiar to him, a throbbing, quasidisco beat he identified as something from Manchester, England, though he couldn’t name the band. In fact, he remembers only the one song from that night, but he still remembers the way Lynda danced mostly on her toes in that steamy living room, pivoting and twirling so that her hair lashed across her face, the old farmhouse floor bouncing under their feet. At first Kevin simply chugged in place, closing his eyes as if he were really caught up in the music, which he wasn’t, not to begin with, still experiencing the thunderous, pounding bass as an assault, still self-consciously sober among all these swaying, drunken dancers, hoping the Philosopher’s Daughter was watching him, hoping she was wondering who this new girl was. But he kept his eyes on Lynda, who danced with her eyes closed, swaying her hips and her long, freckled arms in a complex, sinuous, but precise relationship to the beat. She wore a loose sundress that swung with every movement of her hips and flared to reveal her calves. The dress had no back to speak of, so that when she spun Kevin saw, under her flying hair, a single, smooth curve of skin, stained red by the lamplight. As the cab glides down the long slope of Lamar toward the river, the busy skyline out of sight behind the heatstruck trees, Kevin remembers hoping the Philosopher’s Daughter was noticing what a good dancer Lynda was, how effortless and sensual and unself-conscious, with not a hint of the Daughter’s spastic Molly Ringwaldisms. In the breaks between tapes he and Lynda visited the keg out back, and soon he was drunk enough so that it wasn’t even an effort not to glance around the dance floor, soon he was drunk enough to dance like Lynda, swaying his own hips and snapping his fingers over his head. During another break he stood breathless to one side as Lynda did a line off the coffee table, lifting her hair back with one hand, baring her slender neck, and he felt an electric surge from his medulla down his spine to the tip of his cock as if he’d done the line himself. He feels it now, in fact.